


Ludwig van

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: classical music & crime, sociopathy & immunity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-31
Updated: 2012-07-31
Packaged: 2017-11-11 03:02:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/473780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock can quote Beethoven's Ninth; of course he can, but he doesn't. Sherlock Holmes does not believe in the brotherhood of man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ludwig van

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moranion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/gifts).



> Happy birthday to the gloriously talented [ Moranion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moranion/pseuds/Moranion), who loves the Ninth. 
> 
> And many thanks to [ChapBook](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ChapBook/pseuds/ChapBook) for the musical consult.

_"Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine."--_ Ludwig van Beethoven  
  


Sherlock can quote Beethoven's Ninth; of course he can, but he doesn't. Sherlock Holmes does not believe in the brotherhood of man. Until, of course, John makes him watch “A Clockwork Orange.”

(He’s seen it before; of course he has, and he hasn’t deleted it, this criminological morality play with its difficult history and its Beethoven, but it’s different now, isn’t it.  It always is when you aren’t all alone.)

“Sit down,” says John, patting the sofa. And Sherlock takes off the goggles and puts down the torch and sits, accepts John’s fingers on the remote and the beer in his hand and his complicity in this scenario because it’s Friday night and quiet-ish in central London and John has asked him, asked him again, to sit in the blue glow of the telly.  He’s put away a criminal today and Lestrade has gone home and his chemistry is stable on the kitchen table and his violin is in its case and there’s nothing for it but to sit in the cool glow of the telly and the warm glow of his blogger with his trigger finger on the remote.  
  
“Classic,” John says as the film sallies forth and little Alex, all eyelash and ultraviolence, struts into the milkbar and greets his mate Billyboy with a “ _How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip oil?”_

“Hmm,” says Sherlock, steepling his fingers.

“Thou eunuch jelly, thou!" adds Alex.

“Ouch,” says John.

“Now that's sociopathic,” says John, as Alex kicks his crew into line to the strains of "The Thieving Magpie.”  

And if Sherlock flinches, it doesn’t show, but he’s leaning forward now, his vertebrae knot-and-cross through his thin shirt.

“You all right?” says John, and Sherlock nods and puts his fingers back together and says,

“All right.”

John watches his ribcage lifting with one eye and says,

 “Unethical,” as little Alex, the criminal element (supposedly) aversion-therapied out of him by a benevolently smiling government, howls at also being conditioned to want to snuff it at the first note of his lovely, lovely Ludwig van.

“Hmm,” says Sherlock.

And John hands him a glass of water because, just because; he doesn’t know.  It’s not like Sherlock to endure popular culture so quietly, and not this, especially not this, this mash-up of music and sociopathy and crime and oh, perhaps the stakes are still too high. A violent sociopath in a nightmare of London who adores classical music and surely by now Sherlock doesn’t think John would think that of him or even allow anyone else to say it or even like it if Sherlock said it himself, but Sherlock’s steepled fingers have been known to speak volumes about stakes.

“Are you,” John says, taking a thin, hoppy swallow of beer, “enjoying this at all?”

"Beethoven is wrong about quite a few things,” says Sherlock, twisting to face him, “but Alex there has a point.”

“What's that?” says John, frantically thumbing down the volume.

“Criminal impulses cannot necessarily be conditioned out of one, no matter what the behaviourists will persist in saying.”

“Yes I think that’s...” says John. “I... are you...?”

“Oh, but criminals might be dissuaded with music,” Sherlock says, “There’s some small evidence of that.”

John swallows again, and Sherlock smiles at him.

“But we don’t want them to be, do we?” he says, and he looks at John and his smile is all the immunity in the world. (To insult, John thinks, to intrusion, to any sort of persecution it might choose to deal them.)

“We don’t,” John says, “Of course we don’t.”

It’s Friday night and quiet in central London and Sherlock leans over and pats John on the shoulder with the flat of his hand and then he puts his temple down where his hand was.

“Oh,” says John.  And that’s all he says while the credits roll and Beethoven filters into the room and gravity is, for the moment, all nonsense.

*******

Six weeks later John comes home from the clinic with a cold and a temperature and nascent starvation and a hand cramp from bureaucracy and a bruised shin and a torn shirt (don’t ask) and maybe even praying that there won’t be a case on tonight and then he hears Sherlock--sweetly, presciently-- soothing the criminals of Westminster with a fleeting shred of the Ninth.

**Author's Note:**

> “Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now.”-Alex on the Ninth Symphony, from Anthony Burgess’s novel, A Clockwork Orange
> 
> [Stanley Kubrick’s film “A Clockwork Orange”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_%28film%29)
> 
> [ “A Clockwork Orange,” scene set to Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cd4hXcgG4c&feature=related)
> 
> “It’s based on routine activity theory and situational crime prevention. You mix different types of activities in locations that are crime-ridden to change the composition of the environment,” said psychologist Jacqueline Helfgott, who chairs the Criminal Justice Department at Seattle University: [ “Soothing criminals with Bach, Brahms, Beethoven”](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20041804/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/police-attack-gangs-bach-beethoven/#.UAZOjPWxr1U)
> 
> [The genesis of the "Ode to Joy" from Schiller's text, Beethoven & Schiller](http://books.google.com/books?id=2ZH3v2_-4F4C&lpg=PR9&ots=0nbcIsBpbn&dq=beethoven%20and%20schiller&lr&pg=PA205#v=onepage&q=%20schiller&f=false)
> 
> [Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3217H8JppI&feature=related): You know, turn it up.


End file.
